The ABM Playbook: Account Tiers, Pipeline Metrics & Tactics That Actually Work | Sidney Waterfall & Sam Kuehnle

Sydney Waterfall: I do not want my goal tied to marketing or website driven X or inbound driven X. Like give me the full target, give me the full number.

Host: So I really wanted to bring Sam and Sydney on from um, Loxo and Open Brand in particular to talk about abm because Sam and Citi run completely different distinct motions because they have completely different and distinct companies that do that basically operate differently. So um, Sam and uh, Cindy, I want to give you guys a chance to first introduce yourselves and your companies and then I want to kind of just get into the nitty gritty on like how your guys ABM strategies are stood up and then I really want to also get into the tactics and the things that you guys do on a, on a um, boots on the ground level.

Sam Kuehnle: Okay, Sydney to kick us off of course.

Sydney Waterfall: Ah, Sydney Waterfall. Nice to see everybody. Um, I was previously a Refine Labs, uh, refiner I guess now I'm an OG alum. Uh, I was with Refine Labs for quite a while, then moved to Passetto uh with Carolyn, Trevor and Chris. And then recently about the last year and a half I went in house to a company called Open Brand who's uh, a private equity owned uh, company. And we sell market and competitive intelligence data to a subset of the market, consumer durables brands and manufacturers and retailers. So we essentially are selling data and insights to companies and if anyone ever knows me, you know I'm the data gal. So I love that.

Sam Kuehnle: Right up your alley. Hello everyone. Sam Kienle, also a former refine labber, um see over at Loxo now. So we sell to recruiters anything that helps you find place the best candidates because we know that LinkedIn Easy Apply isn't really helping anyone these days. So it's more how do you go out and find the candidates and we've got a dual motion go to market. So plg, slg and it's, it's a fun world when you're selling to recruiters who we focus on agency recruiters. So our Universe is over 200,000 companies globally but we also sell to in house recruiters. So that makes our Tamil every company in existence. Right. So how does ABM fit into that? Is is another fun flip uh side of the coin to Sydney's world that we'll be getting into.

Host: Let's jump into these accounts, into these companies and your ABM motions because you guys set the stage a little bit here. Uh, Sam, you kind of, you kind of said it. 200,000 plus companies that you could conceivably target that's an enormous total addressable market. And then, uh, Sydney, I know you said you sell into a more of a bespoke or more of a much smaller TAM overall. So I want to kind of get into the, kind of the discussion about how you guys think about or how you guys do your ABM in terms of like segment and like how many accounts you guys are actually targeting. Just given who you could conceivably target and how you make the decision of here's who we're going to target and how we're going to target them versus who's here, who is here, this is who we are not going to target. So I want to kind of let you both explain a little bit how you approach that.

Sydney Waterfall: Sure. So for us we have a much smaller um, terms of number of accounts that we target, but our revenue potential per account is likely much higher than um, the accounts that uh, Sam probably targets. So that being said, we have a target account list of around 3,000 companies that we prioritize. And within those 3,000 we have four different tiers, um, segmented out from strategic through tier one, tier two, tier three, um, that way. So uh, we, and that also includes our customer, um, base. We also tier as well into the same tiers. So we know how to go after white space as well. One of I think the unique things at Open Brand is those are our main segments are going to be brands and retailers that sell consumer durables products. So it's a product that you buy every three months or three years. Excuse me. So think of appliances, uh, power drills, grills, lawnmowers, um, blenders, like anything you buy every three years. So not cpg, econ. Yeah. Um, but we also, our revenue model is a land and expansion, expand revenue model. So we um, grow those accounts over time after we acquire them. And so when you think about our approach, how it might be different is I'm not solely exclusively looking at new logo. Uh, I'm also looking at just new bookings, revenue and new bookings. Um, pipeline is essentially what I'm looking at across the funnel and how we segment and tier that is going to be a lot different than uh, in the campaigns we run. And all of that, which I'm sure we'll get into is going to be much different than like if you're exclusively focused on growth, we are focused on growth, but from two, two different segments. Right. We have to keep acquiring new, you know what, what you land, you have to expand. And if you're not landing anything, you're not going to be able to expand it later. So uh, that's kind of our just like total go to market strategy. Um, we have some additional segments outside, um, I call them our secondary segments and they're not really like a huge priority for us to spend a lot of resources to them. But if they come to us, of course we're going to sell them data. So that's kind of how we segment our world at a high level.

Host: Are your tiers all the same size? You have four tiers and 3,000 accounts. So let's just do some quick math. They're not evenly distributed. Right. You probably have your A tiers, probably a hundred, maybe 200. And then you kind of go down the line and as you go down tiers it's more companies but less budget and less energy. I would say focus to it. Is that fair to say?

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah. Our strategic accounts, we have 20 accounts.

Host: Oh wow.

Sydney Waterfall: Strategic.

Host: Okay.

Sydney Waterfall: So it's like we are, yeah, uh, very, very high. They're basically like strategic partners almost. Um, right. And that we want to, we want to land these accounts in three to five years. I mean obviously we want to land them before that, but that's kind of like the goal. Um, and then our tier one accounts, we have about 180 and then we go to tier two. Um, now you're going to quiz me exactly the numbers. There's about 800 in tier two and then the rest are in tier three. So that's kind of how we segment our, our world out.

Host: All right. And Sam, let's, let's go through, go through how you guys, how you think about the list. Uh, at Loxo, just given all the companies you could potentially put inside of

Sam Kuehnle: it, the list, everyone is strategic. We just have one list. No, totally kidding. Um, yeah, so our team, we're really growth focused. A lot of stuff is just based on just Landlam. The seat based subscription is the main source of revenue there. So yeah, when it comes to ours, there's different types of recruitment. Basically there's executive search, there's temporary type work, um, there's permanent placement hire. So the way that we've orchestrated it is really looking at who are our best long term customers. Like what sizes are they, what regions are they in, what types of recruitment do they do? And while everyone would love to go after the largest recruitment firm, the Korn Ferry, and say, you know, that's our perfect icp, you know, it usually isn't because when they're that large, they actually, they've custom built all of their own backend to their services. So we found our sweet spot in terms of who can we win at the highest rates and who stays with us the longest, who are our best customers to work with and everything else. And that's how we started to structure and work backwards from what makes those companies up. Uh, those are a lot of our tier ones. Then we say, okay, who can we sell into that we win high, that gets good value. But you know, there's some use case functionality that we might not do phenomenally or we need a partner to plug in for. Okay, that might be a tier two. Tier three is, you know, they do recruitment but they can use our services. But you know, maybe they're super small. It's not worth dedicating a full fledged AE BDR to go chase them down. You know that the CAC numbers start to go up because as Sidney mentioned, we're not a, we're not a crazy expensive tool. Our pricing's on our website. You know, we start at $149 a month for one user. So you can run the math and start to figure that out. But that's how we really basically figured out what are our tiers. And then from there that's more of a what do we prioritize in terms of where are we dedicating resources, how much marketing spend, where are we having BDRs send the calls to, what's getting done at A1 to many air cover aspect with marketing emails and everything else versus where do we want to be more tailored, more personalized, go on site and do that? So it's for us, it's not so much that we want to win all of these, but how we, how do we want to allocate our team to stack the deck in our favor with this massive market?

Host: And uh, how big, how many accounts total is loxo targeting now? And then you mentioned three tiers about how do you have it broken out?

Sam Kuehnle: Oh yeah.

Host: I mean we're again, rough estimates are fine. Yeah, I mean there's a grade on this question.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah, I mean I can look at our LinkedIn. You'd laugh at our LinkedIn audiences.

Host: Um, no, I wouldn't.

Sam Kuehnle: Well, just the size of it, but I mean, yeah, I mean when you go and look at agencies alone in the world, there's a quarter of a million of them that just fit that niche. And again, that doesn't even touch the in house audiences that we could serve. So huge, huge number of accounts there that we could be getting in front of.

Host: All right, I want to ask A little bit about the kind of building of the list because there's a lot of stakeholders that end up getting involved here. Right? Especially Sydney. At a company like yours, where there's such a small tam, there's going to be a lot of strong opinions you guys sell into a certain amount of companies. Right. And, you know, one thing we see a lot of, um, on our side with the ABM programs that we run or refine is, you know, sales largely has the say in deciding the list, and marketing kind of gets asked to run with it. And then we have to do our due diligence, vetting it and making sure we're having that kind of alignment with the marketing leader and that those things are in a good place for both of you being in house and probably having much more time to dedicate towards making sure that your lists are exactly what you think you can realistically win. Uh, I'm really curious about, um, like, who and how are those account lists getting decided? What's that process look like? Who's in the room? What rumor? Uh, what role are you both playing in it?

Sydney Waterfall: Uh, I'll start first. Not a surprise. I like to play the data and operations role in, uh, in this.

Host: I'm shocked to hear that, I have to say.

Sydney Waterfall: Shocked. Um, no, we, we have a little bit of an advantage. And I've talked about this a little bit on my LinkedIn. It was, uh, kind of the opposite of, you know, how do we narrow down the list? But for us, it's more of a prioritization exercise. Um, and, you know, we sell data and insights, so we have data on who on all of this that we like. Who would want to buy this? Well, let's see who shows up in the data. Let's see what brands and retailers and what companies show up across all of our data products versus, um, a few of our data products. Right. And so basically we were able to use our own product, which is, you know, not everybody has the luxury of. So I totally get that. Uh, it was like a little bit of a hack for us. Um, so we basically did like a product analysis. Step one of like, okay, let's just look at all of our white space in our data that we have. Who could we sell to that we're not? And then how many products could we sell them to sell them of? Ah, we have three core data products. Um, and, you know, within that, you've got other kind of things that you could sell. But then across that, how many categories do they show up in, in our data? Because that's like a um, another lover of our pricing and packaging. So we were basically able to like export our product data, run some data analysis and be like okay, well here's the accounts that show up across a wider spectrum AKA we have the potential, the white space to sell them more dollars. And and so we started with that and then we went into with sales. So that was actually a more of like a marketing and finance kind of exercise really. And then we met with sales and said okay, based on this, what is your feedback on the market, on the categories, on the data solutions? We have different competitors and different data solutions and different use cases. So we kind of use them for like qualitative, like how will we prioritize this? Um, draft the list. We all kind of look at it. Um, but at the end of the day uh, sales really does sign off on the prioritization. Like if it's the strategics are kind of a no brainer. Um, but between the tier ones and the tier twos and the tier threes, um, that prioritization and that call is usually the sales team of the prioritization. But really we started with the data mapping and like mapping your white space potential was more of a marketing and finance led um, organization like play first um, and then from there it's like great, how do we operationalize this in our systems? Right. And that was again kind of a, um, more marketing and finance led. Also just given my rev ops background, I was just like I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it.

Host: I have to know because like marketing and finance tend to, tend to try to avoid each other, especially marketing to finance. I'm so happy to hear you embrace that relationship. Like what, what are those conversations like when you're kind of going through accountless prioritization and things like that for people maybe who don't have that kind of exposure.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, our finance uh, relationship is really good. Like basically me, our chief commercial officer and our head of finance are like the three go to M market kind of stakeholders. You know, then you have product, then you have our CEO and you know all uh, these different departments. But we really align at like it's us three really trying to drive go to market. Like we are responsible for the growth, the retention, the net dollars and like how we gain market share in our category really. So we kind of align at that level. Um, and our finance team, you know, they're the ones at the contracts, they're the ones looking at like the white space and the market and so you know, they take a very analytical dollar view where I might take a more like, how could we target, how do we account penetration? Is this the right list? What about this market versus that market? And we kind of started there before we kind of, you know, sales was involved obviously, but then went into sales to kind of make the prioritizations, the gut calls, the. We think we're stronger over here in this product. So we're going to, in the market, in the competitive set. So we're going to make sure that white space is a tier one versus a tier two, for example. Um, so it is a little unique, but our finance department is very collaborative and they're again, it's our, our market drives that. Like, if we had a market like Sam's, I don't think that that relationship would be as close as it is. But that's just me speculating.

Sam Kuehnle: Yes and no. Yes and no.

Host: It's Sam, jump in. Describe your process, describe your relationship with finance. Let's hear.

Sam Kuehnle: Well, it's good, but it's similar to sitting there. I everything with data perspective. And it's not the like, well, here's our cost per lead. Because finance is like cool. That's not what keeps the business running though. So when you can talk their language, when I'm talking payback periods and margins and everything else, like, they're like, okay, he understands and he's orienting toward the same thing that we are versus that's a cute little indicator over there. But I don't care if your click through rates are this or that. Like what's this mean for us? Are you investing based on that? Because that's, they're, they're very data oriented. Like, that's illogical. That doesn't make sense. So the more that you can get on the same page with them. I have a great relationship with the finance teams I work with. Because you're able to speak the same language.

Host: Right. And you're just operating your list, um, at a larger scale overall. And you're kind of coming and determining that, uh, with finance and saying, look, I know we have 130,000 companies we could potentially do. Here's how I want to tier them off based on their firmographics. Here's what payback and CAC and LTV look like for that.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah. So we were interesting that we, we're a much earlier stage than Sydney's company. So when we started our ABM M initiative, we didn't have a cfo, we didn't have a control or anything like that so it was um, myself, our head of sales and our head of business development and then a rev ops person. Basically we all got together and we looked at the data foregone, who can we acquire, how long are they staying and then running the segments that way. But then the beauty of head of sales, head of BD and myself, we'd all been here for years. We knew anecdotally, even though the data saying this, that we sell well in this industry. We know based on conversations a really hard sell or they actually don't stick around as long as this data is showing. So we could gut check because we all know no data is perfect no matter how anal we might be about it. So it was a good exercise for us uh, though to be able to kind of just like use common sense along with that to figure out what should our ideal list look like. Like yeah, again we'd love to sell the super high seats but there's only so many of them and we only also have so many AES that are equipped with the skill set to have that type of relationship based selling when so many of our AES were more junior at the time. They were, they were new to the company or anything else where it uh, I want to say it would have done us more harm than good to throw them in too early. But we need to develop the relationship more and take our time to get into that.

Host: Sure. I actually want to ask about the AE BDR kind of aspect of it too. I know I had a question kind of marked for myself on like where. Where the BDR motion falls for each of your companies and how they, how they work with your ABM motion. Um, Cindy, I know we were doing some prep. You said you guys are actually in the market for one. You can, you can certainly put a call out here. But um, Sam, I wanted to ask you as well like about the BDRs that kind of fall under you or is it sounds like you have a BDR leader that you probably collaborate with. I would guess give uh, me a sense of how that, how that dynamic plays out.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah. So we have a BDR leader, they roll into the sales organization ultimately. And I'm completely fine with that because again, uh, we're all, we share the same revenue target. Marketing doesn't have a goal, BDR doesn't have a goal, Sales doesn't have a goal. We say roughly based on our investment in headcount here, spend here. Here's what you should do. But hey, this quarter marketing might pull a little bit more next quarter. Sales might pull a little bit more. As long as we're all oriented and rowing towards that same whatever revenue target, that's what we're after. So that's why I think it works better for us, because we're not competing over attribution or like who gets credit for this or that. It's did we drive the ideal outcome that we were after? So like with our PLG motion, for example, when I first came in, we had day trials for our product and I remember seeing we would get at the time, for every four hand raisers that came in, three were plg, one was slg.

Host: Mhm.

Sam Kuehnle: So I'm just like, hey, this is great. Like, you know, we've got good volume. And then I go in and look at the conversions from plg. I'm like, why do we have like barely any pipeline from this? This doesn't make sense. And so I reached out to the BDR leader at the time and I said like, hey, what's going on? Like, what can I supply you with to make sure that BDRs are jumping on these? You know, they don't, they said they don't want to talk to sales, but we take a consultative approach. And he's like, oh, they don't call on them until day 15 because otherwise they don't get credit for for it. And I had to pick up my jaw off the ground. I was like, are you kidding me? Um, so I was like, let me deal with the whole commission thing. Start calling them today and literally the next week. When you looked at week over week charts, forex growth and pipeline just from that, because of things like that. But that's where again, marketing's job and what we do is we bring all these great leads to the front door, but we have to have someone there to greet them, to walk them in. And that's where BDR sales are so good. And we say like, hey, again, I don't care who gets credit for what. I was a bdr. I understand commissions are important, like whatever they need to do to make sure that we reward them for their work. But what are we doing as a business? Are we hurting ourselves actively by current processes?

Host: Right. Are the incentives helping us get pipeline from what, from what is coming into the door. Right. Uh, and like credit to you for like, you know, looking at like, what's the SLA and the commission structure look like here? And does this, does this match, like what the company needs to get to gets you as a goal? Yeah, I have to imagine that that's you know just such a critical piece of that.

Sam Kuehnle: That's an interesting conversation. Everyone look like everyone looked at after we're like yeah that makes sense. Like why wouldn't we do it? But I mean those are why I always say like don't accept just like because it's always been this way as uh. We're going to keep doing it this way for reasons like that.

Host: Right. And then Sydney, I know you guys much more of an AE focus BDR not as big of a component. Give me a sense of that dynamic with, with sales kind of as you guys are in the throes of the program itself and like where that, how that dynamic plays out.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, BDR reports into sales. We are hiring some. So if you know of anyone let me know. Um, tell them to prospect me and we can see it's kidding. Um, no. So BDR sits under sales and we have a full cycle AES. So um, you know they do full, full revenue. Um so um, on, on the upsell side as well, um, we don't have that position split out of like you're due only expansion versus you're responsible for the renewal. It's full cycle. Which I think um, for us and our size and the size of our team and stuff makes a lot of sense right now. Um because they're like accountable to the full customer experience. Um, so yeah we, I try to look at it as like marketing is to enable our BDRs from, to make a their job easier, to make prioritization easier, to self serve them with data that they might need that would save them time to surface up things that would be relevant to them. Um, so when I think about bdrs and reporting into sales or marketing, I think it's the same kind um of approach I would take from a marketing leader. It's like my job is to generate signals first party, second party, third party leverage data and then give them the best at bats as we can. No matter what channel is driving that. That's kind of our approach to um, bdrs and things like that. And to Sam's point on attribution, um, we also don't have department level attribution at all. We don't care what source it comes from. So um, you know that has to be aligned at the board level and the executive level for it to work. But because of that the marketing team might put together a great outbound campaign and do a bunch of content and outbound and structures and we might not even leverage that in a marketing in a quote unquote traditional marketing channel. But it might be the right thing to do to go get six more meetings. Right. So um, I think that to your point about the commission structures and the incentives, like it's very, very important. And that was something that I was very passionate about when I was interviewing and like accepting this role that like I do not want my goal tied to marketing or website driven X or inbound driven X. Like give me the full target, give me the full number and um, we play the team. Yeah, yeah.

Host: Because like to both your point, even Sam, you run POG and an SLG motion. But no deal gets closed for you guys without sales working that deal and getting that signature. Right. So it doesn't matter really where it gets sourced from. It's just getting, getting aligned on those, those right. North Star metrics. And I do want to actually it's a perfect segue into this and I want to have time to get into the tactics also. So I'm going to talk measurement and then we're going to get into some specific campaign stuff you guys are doing because we had some interesting ideas that we talked about. So let's talk a little bit on the measurement. Like what's, what's the North Star for both of you? Uh, any leading and lagging indicators? Uh, I know Sam, you have a really fast sales cycle, uh, at least compared to Sydney. So I'm curious how you both look at those things, uh, just given the differences between your two programs.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah, I mean ours is simple. It's revenue at the end of the day. So because we could previously target everyone very loosey goosey and apply resources wherever we wanted because we are now saying we're going to spend more money, more time, more resources towards these accounts that are more likely to win. It's a pretty easy like cause and effect correlation of seeing where we're spending our time. If we're doing it on the right accounts, we should win more, we should have more revenue because again it's not, we don't have infinite accounts, but relative to our company size, we don't have, we have maybe 100 employees. Like you can kind of do the math to see we're not going to saturate our AE and BDR books. There's going to be plenty of accounts for them to go after. So it's really that revenue level. And then we break it out again by the tiers. We have tier 1, 2, tier of T3 and then non ICP and just a stacked bar chart I can look and see over time. Are we starting to See more of that bar each quarter. Fill up with tier one, tier two, last of tier three, tier four or non icp. But, um, people still come in organically. They'll still find us because they're searching what's the best ats. We can't stop a non ICP from coming in. We'll take that if they want to come to us. But again, we're just not going to proactively go after them. So really it's revenue leading indicator are hand raisers and pipeline from the higher tier accounts. Because again, that's what we're prioritizing. But it's, it's simple. But simple is better in our case. It keeps us focused.

Host: And it's really irrelevant for you whether it's POG or they fill a demo out. You said it was about a, uh, three to, uh, three to one split between POG and slg.

Sam Kuehnle: You started.

Host: Is it, is it still that or is it.

Sam Kuehnle: We leveled it a little bit more. Just when I looked at the funnels. When people talk to sales, higher win rates, they adopt the product better because they understand it and they use it better. So, uh, we've just done some conversion rate optimization, different things to orient people to want to talk to sales a little bit more. Um, probably 50, 50 split now. Okay.

Host: All right. Cindy, how about you? You guys have a small account list. A lot of, A lot of upsell expansion. Uh, that goes with that. I'm sure that's definitely part of how you're looking at the program. Tell me how you're measuring this thing holistically. What are you going to the board with to say this is working, this is not?

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah. At a leadership level, um, our North Star metric is net revenue, um, which I like because it takes into account churn and new bookings together. Right. As the whole function. Um, it reminds me back of, you know, auditing SaaS, companies where their growth rate was great, but they weren't outgrowing their, uh, churn, which was not a great place to be in such a,

Host: such a problem six years ago.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, but from like a marketing team perspective and then what I report out to my CEO and to like in our board meetings, it's um, total new business pipeline creation from all sources. And that includes, um, new logo, um, new logo pipeline, and also upsell expansion pipeline. Obviously we break that out like how much new versus upsell and how does that compare to our goal and then within that. So that's like our top level metric. Um, did we hit goal? Did we not? How are we pacing and then we look at that um, by what percent of each of those buckets is uh target accounts versus non target accounts and then by tier. So very similar to like are our tiers growing over time? Do we have more um and we can look at like win rates and things like that along that funnel. Uh, obviously new logo and upsell win rates are going to be a little bit different. Um and then because we also look like because we have a smaller number of accounts. One thing that I look at is, is um, in you know pre opportunity and in the opportunity is not only is it a target account contact, but we can sell to multiple buying centers within an account. Because these accounts are very large enterprises and certain products, um, you know kind of lead different um, buying centers that you would sell into. So we kind of documented look at all our buying centers and then we took that and we look at okay based on all of our data that we've used. So we look at user data, cohort data, marketing automation data, like any data sources that we have. Um, and we basically did a customer Persona and buying center analysis. And so then that's like another kind of tier that I look at is like we rank our Personas and our like kind of more quote buying centers um by tier one and tier two. Who are we really really good at selling into, who are we pretty good at selling into and who do we like want to sell into. But we like kind of haven't figured it out. It's not like a well oiled machine yet. Um and so I also look at what percent are tier one contacts versus tier two contacts which kind of go into our tier one and tier two Personas. Because um, that gives me a little bit more like a middle top of funnel gauge to see like are we bringing in not only the right accounts but are we bringing in the right people that sales can close confidently and quickly and wants to be talking to. So that's just kind of a little extra nugget that um, we've actually recently added to our program. When we started our program it was not at that level and we recently did that analysis this year to like have that added to our program.

Host: That's like a 30,000 foot to like three foot view of measuring your ABA program. That was, that was pretty, pretty thorough and awesome. It sounds like you guys uh, are almost mapping and targeting at the contact level across it. Like you're getting into the buying group and then contacts within said buying group based on the work you've done with your again like you Said you have an unfair advantage because it's your first party data, but hey, leverage it as you're supposed to. Right. So you're, so you're, you're using that to kind of map buying centers and then contacts within that to uh, to target and try to forge relationship with that.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, yes. And like, yes, we have that advantage compared to other companies, but our competitors have the same advantage that we have. I just hope we are leveraging it better than they are. Um, but so yeah, we, we do target account like account level targeting. Um, and then we also have used like enrichment tools and like Clay is a great tool that we've leveraged to bring in our tier one, um, job titles and Personas for our uh, first strategic Tier one and tier two, we're bringing in tier one and tier two contacts. For tier three accounts. We're only bringing in tier one contacts. Right. So that's how we kind of build out our um, addressable contact, marketable base. And then we're leveraging that for marketing campaigns. Um, outbound targeting on paid is um, as contact based as we can try to get it. Uh, because these are very, very big accounts, like 10,000 employees, 30,000 employees. Like we, we have to be very smart with our dollars. Um, and we don't have a large paid budget or marketing budget. Um, you know, we run on efficiency here. So. Yeah. Cool.

Host: All right. And then Sam, I know we were talking, you have almost the opposite problem because you have so many people, but you also get a lot of personal email addresses. So you do a lot of work on matching, I believe you said, when we were talking about that a little bit. I didn't mean uh, to divert off into targeting a little bit, but since Sydney walked through it, I figured I might as well ask you the same question.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah, we can get into it and kind of speak to Kayani's question. Um, but again, proprietary advantage a little bit. So we sell to recruiters, um, applicant tracking systems. But also when you're proactively recruiting people, you need their contact information. Well, if you're trying to say, hey, you know Matt, you work at Refine Labs, but hey, do you want to come work over at loxo? I'm not going to email you on your locks on your refined labs email.

Host: Right.

Sam Kuehnle: You're going to reach out to their, their personal information, whether it's their personal email, LinkedIn, whatever that is. So we have a huge database of personal contact information as well. And as everyone here has probably experienced, whether it's Google or Facebook, even LinkedIn, most people sync their personal email to it, not their work email. So that's why most match rates are pretty abysmal when you load in ZoomInfo Apollo list because you're hoping that people use their work email, but not. So, um, I did a massive build where we basically, we have this universe of companies that anyone could work at and then who are all the employees within it. And so I can then pull, because we have work email, I pull their work email, then I pull their personal email and then I can pull their cell phone. Obviously in perfect world we have information on all three. It's not a perfect world, but usually we'll get a couple of those hits. And so then I can match that over to the different platforms that we use or we can plug it into our CRM and then do an uploaded contact list into whatever platforms we may be using. Whether it's email ads, BDRs, just straight from Salesforce or Salesloft, they have that information. So it's definitely given us a good advantage on the match rate side, um, to help get to that level. And with it, again, you know, their, their job title because again, when people are hunting, hey, I need to find someone who's a cfo, they want to come be a CFO here. Or they might be a lower level, but we have all the information that usually you would want to get to. If you know your true icp, then you can work backwards from that.

Host: Nice. Diana, did you feel, uh, that answer your question? Yeah.

Sam Kuehnle: Cool.

Host: All right, let's, let's talk. I really want to talk in, uh, the tactics of what you both are doing because you guys are both doing some interesting things, uh, different things on the same channel sometimes too. So Sydney, uh, I know you talked a little bit about what you guys are doing on that kind of awareness level, uh, with your, with your accounts. Walk a little bit through some of the really specific campaign tactics that you guys are doing. Uh, I have a follow up question based on one of the things you provided, but go ahead and walk through how you guys are, are, uh, approaching getting in front of your target accounts.

Sydney Waterfall: So we kind of have a strategy of being a little bit more buyer centric, kind of a little bit out of the Refine Lab methodology that uh, attracted me to Refine Lab so many years ago. But we want to serve up and um, try to give as much content as we can. Um, and then we also do still gate some content. Right. So, um, that's a whole nother webinar, but, uh.

Host: Is it?

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah. Um, but the main thing that we are trying to do as a brand and as a company is to really go, uh, have content that is insights driven and data driven in places where our customers are. So that sounds like super high level, but I'll give you an idea here. So we always have, um, a brand awareness campaign running, um, at all times. We're really trying to increase our brand awareness in the space against some of our incumbents in the market. So we always have always on brand awareness campaigns that kind of just go to our website that educates people on who we do what we do. And we try to get, we try to get fun with the creative a little bit more on those campaigns, um, to kind of break up the feed. Um, and then we are leveraging, um, our data assets to show people what we have and give them a taste of it without them really having to talk to sales. So we don't have a trial, we don't have things like that, but we can leverage data that is for, um, a different time series than they might want right now. Um, and so we built these custom dashboards that showcase all of our data products in a really nice, clean view. So someone can kind of see, oh, like, what does open brand do? Okay, that's interesting. But, like, what does the data actually look like? What kind of insights could I get from this? And they could access that. Um, and we put that out publicly, um, which was kind of a big bet for us, um, was to go public with some of this stuff. Um, and that's actually a really great funnel for us. People can see the data, engage with it, they can come back when we update it and then they can convert if they want to see more, they want to talk to someone about the methodology behind the data. What is it, like, what other, uh, stuff do you have that's kind of behind a paywall? So that's been like a really good kind of campaign that we've launched that is consistently one of our highest. Converting things to not only educate people on what we do, but then convert the traffic into sales conversations.

Sam Kuehnle: Nice.

Host: And, um, the creative views. You guys use a lot of infographics, I would imagine, to kind of present that in advertising or even in email. Right. Just to kind of get wet people's appetite a little bit, give them a preview of it.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, we are very insights driven company. So if we are not leading with an insight and why it matters, and we take that approach in outbound, we take that approach in infographics, in our blog posts. Um, we have a Whole category analyst team that's primarily works with our customers but I will leverage them for content as well for um, you know, upsell targeting and even just new logo targeting depending on the use case as well. And the, the other thing that we do is um, on our always on campaigns we started with just general kind of brand awareness and product awareness like what the heck do you guys do type of information. And we've then layered on use case based awareness messaging uh, for those always on brand campaigns. And we've been seeing that the use case um, engagement is hot as is generating more engagement um, like on platform and things like that. Which is really kind of nice to see.

Host: So if you can share for open brand, what would an example of a use case be? Because I feel like people talk about use case sometimes with their targeting and their company and like tend to tend to make it either really narrow or so broad that it could be anyone's use case.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, so we kind of have, I'll give you two examples. We're running a big integrated campaign right now around product line reviews. These are like QBRs or like big strategic meetings that um, you know retailers have to see what brands they want to put on the shelf and how they're going to drive more sales for the retailer. But then the brands go into those meetings always trying to get uh, more shelf space or pitch products or trying to get more engagement in order to sell more products. Right. So they're really kind of high stakes conversations. And so that's a key use case um, that actually hits multiple Personas. Right. And so that's a more general use case that hits like three to four core Personas that we sell into. And so we have use case messaging around, you know, product line review and make sure you have X type of data for your product line review like more general messaging. And then we have like Persona based use case like you know, sales Persona might say like make sure you, you win uh, that share of shelf in your product line review. Right. So it's like instantly hitting on something they care about which is share of shelf and then instantly hitting on product line review which is like something that they're very familiar with. And it's like oh by the way open brand can help with that. So that's an example of like a broader use case and then we go into a more niche use case which would be for like our ah, pricing, um, our competitive intelligence product which is like pricing and promotions data and uh, what do you know, price people with pricing titles really like that uh, Pricing data. So yeah, we'll say that's a little bit more niche to like, specific, um, titles. But it's a core use case. So it's like, uh, you know, your Amazon prime is next week. Are you ready for Amazon Prime? Are you sure your price is correctly in the market? Or how are you going to monitor pricing and promotions during a key promotional period? Are you going to win prime or are you going to lose Prime? Right. Um, and so that's very like use case based messaging, but a little bit more targeted of a use case.

Host: What I love about both those use cases is like you're literally finding a line on like a JD for your titles almost or for those roles and just creating a use case for them with your content to get in front of them and be like, hey, I solved. This is literally on your job description and I'm going to help solve this problem for you if you engage with my content. And I, I love that approach to use cases for you.

Sydney Waterfall: Uh, and that's been an evolution. So, you know, we did. You got there.

Host: Yeah, well, I mean, you got there though. And that's the important part. That's the other thing I think that's important to say for anyone here is like ABM is such an iterative process, right? Like you'll run it for a quarter or if you have a longer sales cycle, maybe it's a half year, you'll learn a lot, what went right, what went wrong. And then you'll iterate and iterate and eventually, you know, two, three periods later you have something where you're like, wow, this is really starting to work for us. Right. Um, Sam, I got same question for you. Like, like tell me some of the interesting kind of tactical things that the LOXO is, is doing right now. Um, you know, channels, campaigns, anything like that. The things you're excited about. Yeah.

Sam Kuehnle: Um, recruiters live on LinkedIn, so it's made it pretty easiest for us to figure out which channel should we spend our most time on.

Host: Uh, marketing, sales and HR. You can always find them on M. LinkedIn.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah, it's brilliant for that. That said, everyone and all of our competitors are also on there. So it's like, yeah, we can show up, but, uh, are we showing up in a way that is memorable, is helpful, is standing out? So, um, we've tried a few different things in Lake Sydney. Where we started is not where we are today. Um, everything is an iteration. You should keep, keep learning. But like, one of my more recent learnings was we thought, hey, we've got this, this whole ABM motion that we've built out. We know by because we're, we're international, we know by region. Are they Europe? Are they Asia Pacific? Are they North America? What tier are they in? What type of recruitment do they do? What's their Persona? Are they an end user? They uh, have firm owner. So like let's build campaigns. For every campaign we'll have, we'll target each of these groups with something that's relevant. Well multiply that combination out and we at any given point could have 75 to 90 campaigns running. And as I said earlier, we're a small company so you can guess how well that worked with our budget. So that then led to testing. It's like, okay, if we do need to figure out this prioritization for budgets and everything else, it came down to the like, what content can be most relevant to people. And we found that usually it was pain based messaging. Most recruiters are struggling with the same type of thing. How do you find the right hire? How do you do it quickly while not sacrificing just a button seat mentality but the right person um, and others are just solving for use cases. So much in the recruitment technology space is we've done it this way for years. They don't know, they haven't really cared to learn. There's technology has evolved, AI has come to the world, how it can be improved. So we proactively show very common use cases. How do you source a candidate? How do you do outreach to 50 qualified candidates? How do you find contact information? Because a lot of these people might be thinking I go to yellow pages to pull their number or I go and type out every email one by one. It's like oh no, you can automate this, this or you can use technology to help with it. So a lot of it is historically that's usually middle to bottom of funnel stuff but for our market it's actually top of funnel because people see like oh wow, I didn't even know that was possible. I didn't think to ask that or query in Google and ChatGPT wherever they're searching. So it ah ended up being an interesting mix where we've drastically reduced down our segmentation to figure out, you know it's usually it's core use cases that we solve for common pains that we use a lot of thought leadership ads for, for and we speak to from personal experience. A ton of our Sales Reps and CSMs come from recruitment backgrounds so they can carry that like I've been there. I understand where you're at. So that content does incredibly well. Uh, we do a lot of customer stories and then we do, uh, we call them like our brand flights. So every four to eight weeks we'll ship something that is much more brand level, thought, not thought leadership, but just like creative. Uh, it definitely errs more on the side of clever, um, to try to grab attention. But it's because that's only 20% of our budget. 80% is a lot of stuff that we know is working. So this is a good way to pull new people into the funnel where again, it's, it's a sea of blue static ads talking about increase your ROI by X, Y, Z. Like that's how we, how we aim to pull in some additional people there.

Host: Yeah, and that's smart because you're in a hyper competitive space. There's dozens if not a hundred competitors. So just making, making a bet with some of your budget, like every, every six, eight weeks just to try to stand out, make a ton of sense.

Sam Kuehnle: And honestly, it's more fun for the team. Like if we're going to be doing marketing job, like why not get a little creative, have some fun with it and if it flops again, it's, it's not a huge part of our budget. We used to go bet the farm. Every campaign was one of these new flights. And we learned that lesson the hard way as well. Where some were hits and some weren't.

Host: Right. But you still give yourself budget and room to have a breakthrough. Right? Like maybe something hits hard and you're like, oh, sue, we could, we could double down on this. This can make its way into that 80% of the budget.

Sam Kuehnle: And that's where we turn into like, okay, let's go build out some specific playbooks. Hey, they're really interested in how do I do a good outreach cadence. Let's go build an outreach cadence. Uh, playbook for executive search for temporary for people in London specifically. Like, those are the signals that we use to say, okay, like we know that this topic lands now. We make it relevant. That's content. Like Sydney mentioned earlier, we give that to our BDRs, to our sales. Like that's how they can then engage the tier one accounts, those who are most interested and say, hey, this is this super helpful, relevant thing to you. Hope it helps, Hope you enjoy it. You know, use that as a foot in the door versus I've got this thing over here. Give me your email and you can come find it. Like, we don't. We don't quite uh, gate or hide things in that way.

Host: Gotcha. You know, we went 47 minutes or 45 minutes until you mentioned. We went 45 minutes without mentioning AI once in this discussion until Sam, you just kind of slid it in during your answer and it just makes me have to ask this question. And uh, I see a couple of questions rolling as I want to give time for those. So I do want to ask for both of you. I uh, mean, AI is just kind of the big halo over all of our lives right now. Especially when uh, in marketers lives. So I'm curious how you guys leverage AI, if at all. Uh, I can say it's certainly fair to say that you don't that much um, in your ABM motions and like where are you finding it to be most effective for each of you?

Sydney Waterfall: I. We've been leveraging AI a decent amount to scale our insights content production. So we have a lot of data. We produce a lot of data driven content that used to take a lot of time m of people pulling data, putting it into a specific format, feeding it into a dashboard. Um, so we've tried to use AI to speed up some of just like the raw data production with some of the assets that we generate so that we can generate um, them for more categories or we can update them more frequently. Like we used to only update our infographics like once a year and now we're getting to the point where like oh, we could update these quarterly after we put this process in place and like make it much more timely and relevant um, for our uh, market. So that's like on the content side, like one thing that we have been leveraging, um, the best way that I personally use AI is not in these like oh, I created like 75 web pages with like 102 personalized ads that like most of them are crappy anyways. Not necessarily.

Host: I've seen those ads and I've seen those landing pages.

Sydney Waterfall: Yeah, not necessarily scaling like one to one like that way we're, we're very um, I guess protective of that versus letting AI do that. We, I use it a lot for um, finding like holes in the account like oh, like what? Like look at this account and see like what people that we don't have in our CRM that we should that fit these Personas and like, or which Personas do we have in this account that haven't engaged with the, the three use cases that we think are the most relevant for that Persona. So it's kind of again like prioritization a little bit more, um, for marketing, but also hopefully for our soon to be BDR as well is kind of how we're trying to leverage it. Um, not necessarily like the fully fledged, you know, download this, you know, comment ebook thing and you learn how to like operate as a bdr. Not necessarily all of that. Um, and then like I've just used it really too for like data analysis and correlation analysis, like deep correlation analysis. That used to take me a lot of time, which now it doesn't need to um, as much time.

Host: Thanks Sam. How about you? I know you guys are um, a little more AI native as a product. You guys have rolled out more AI features into Loxo. So I think that's part of the calculus probably for you. But give me a sense for how uh, you're leveraging AI as part of the motion that you're doing.

Sam Kuehnle: Yeah, so in the product it's interesting because so many recruiters, they're going from nothing to something. So everything AI is very new, novel, good for them. Whereas in the marketing world it's like again we see the slope everywhere. So um, we really have three, four buckets that we've done. One is similar to sitting. It's like transcript insights, just ingest a ton of data from um, customer calls, prospect calls, what themes are coming up constantly, what topics, how are we winning against this type of thing and positioning ourselves more just again like instead of everyone shooting from the hit. 10 different AES, 10 different talk tracks. What's working right now, that's let everyone know. Hey, don't have to follow this line by line but this is what's going to help you, guide you in this conversation or for BDRs. Hey, if you email about this right now, it's, it's being well received, it's going to increase your, your likelihood for an open or reply. Something like that. Um, brand consistency is a big one. So as we're constantly. We ship updates every day. So making sure that just hey, are our pages up to date in terms of this page isn't saying a data point that differentiates or counters against what's on this page. So reconciling a lot of stuff there kind of like an editor in a way. Um, is one. Our team is big on posting a lot of our AES and BDRs. We have some fun like every, every week we do a little gift card for everyone or for someone that shares just a good post with the market. And a lot of companies are kind of like, oh, I don't Know what if they kind of go off the, off the rocker a little bit and post something that we don't like. So we, we just have a custom GPT that we built that basically says like hey, is this going to be a good post? Write it up, what do you think? Put it into here. And then it tells you like yeah, this is good. And it's based on things that we say like what's our approach to market, what's our voice, how do we talk or about competitors? Is there anything proprietary in here that should not be shared? So just a quick tool of enablement for the team so that they feel empowered to share without having to feel embarrassed or something like I don't know about this, should I post it, should I not? It gives them quick clarity exactly on what to do and if it does get, it doesn't get rejected by but it's like hey, you might want to clean this up. It tells them like here's what to fix within that or here's how you might want to approach it. So that's one. Um, then the last one is an internal use case for us. I looked at our goals this year, I was like how the heck are we going to hit them? And so just like the whole vibe code thing that's let's build a tool for ourselves like what are opportunities within marketing, where are we falling short relative to benchmarks, where are we exceeding? Just so we know like where should we focus our time? Is it top of funnel, middle of funnel within this specific stage? So a little bit of everything with the team but it's always been more guide you to the right part versus here's a bunch of stuff it's going to create on our behalf. Now let's just go put it out there.

Host: Right. I love how you use it to enable your team uh, much more. And so ultimately you want your people to move faster but not like have their output, their thinking, their judgment get replaced by it necessarily.

Sam Kuehnle: There's nothing worse than getting a 23 page document from someone that they're like hey, look at my AI and they didn't even read it. And you're reading it and just like God, this is the worst thing ever.

Host: Can totally relate to that. David asked a question and I know Sydney, you answered it in the chat, but I want to make sure it makes it to the airwaves as well. So uh, uh, David asked about how you might multi thread personalization for one to one accounts and how you enable the primary buying champion to influence internally. Um, I think Sydney, that's directed towards you just given, given the given that seems like that's an open brands wheelhouse. So I'm curious how you uh, how you guys approach that.

Sydney Waterfall: So I'll uh, answer this from a marketing and then a sales perspective. From a marketing perspective. I mentioned earlier we did a lot of work on our Persona, uh, analysis and buying center analysis that's really enabled us to better personalized as a one to few and a one to many on the marketing side. So uh, we have specific offers or specific products that maybe are only relevant to certain people. And before it was like you know, title contains uh, but titles can be very broad, you know, depending on org structures. So having we have a Persona field and then we have a Persona tag and we have a lot of custom tags like that mean things in our industry that like would not make any sense to other companies. So we kind of use those two fields to tailor uh, email nurtures, you know, comms from our CEO. Like who should the CEO be like sending an email to versus the you know, user list. We have 2,000 users at an account. Right. Um, so things like that has helped the marketing team kind of scale ah, personalization in a way, like from a messaging and like an offer perspective. But then when the account is like in pipeline or we're starting to get some traffic action from the account, we've um, tried to create um, use case based um, slides with like here's the business problem, here was um, yeah, here was the business problem, here's how we helped and here was the outcome. And it's kind of those are also by use case and by Persona as well. So then the sales team can like pick and play, pick from those decks and make sure the internal champion can like provide those to the right people if we're not already talking to them. Um, and then some of it is just kind of you know enabling the sales team with data to say here's who you're talking to at the account. Here's all these other contacts we enriched that are tier one contacts that we haven't had any engagement with and maybe you should start prospecting into those, you know, X time. So marketing um, is kind of more of an enablement backseat when, when the account is being worked or when that's happening. And I always try to leverage uh, enablement with data and then like with content is kind of like how I view marketing can support sales in the best way and then they give us feedback. I really need this. I'm like okay, you know, go from There. So that's just how we've tried to really help. Reaching new buying centers. Is it global versus North America? Is it, you know, navigating all the enterprise kind of, uh, fun selling obstacles, I would say.

Host: All right, last question because I'm sure you guys got somewhere to be at the top of the hour. Real quick, what are, uh, what is one thing you both are experimenting with right now with your, with your go to market motions that you're uber excited about. And uh, Sam, I'll start with you. You don't mind?

Sam Kuehnle: Yes, I mean um, direct mail and gifting. We really hadn't done anything in the past just due to lack of again prioritization. When you can, you, you could mail 200,000 companies, let alone the people within that, that's a daunting task. So, uh, that's when, now we have a good grasp on who do we want to go after. Who are the truly like high level strategic accounts or anything else. But we're gonna, I mean it's nothing novel, nothing groundbreaking. This is not a new thing by any means, but we know it works. We just weren't sure where should we invest that type of money to know that it would actually be worthwhile. So that's one that we're, we're getting into as we speak.

Sydney Waterfall: Cool.

Host: Uh, Sydney, how about you?

Sydney Waterfall: Uh, you come to mind. And one's like classic abm, but um, we actually are experimenting on meta. Um, we're trying to get out of our audience is not on LinkedIn at a highest rate, like um, you know, marketers, salespeople things. We do have some of our audience there, but it's not the penetration that I want or I believe we could have with paid. So um, we've been experimenting with meta. We've been texting, testing like contact based audiences and also just um, the audiences using um, the algorithm and training the algorithm. The newest update to basically go get the right audience, um, which some would say, well that seems like an odd strategy for someone that targets 3,000 accounts, but I am pretty bullish on it. And we've been seeing some actually pretty, uh, good results with top of funnel engagement like newsletter signup. Right. Like if we're marketing a newsletter and it's finding the right people to see the newsletter and then those people are signing up for a newsletter and they're relatively in the, you know, the right accounts and roughly the right departments, um, that's kind of been surprising to us. Um, and I think it's something that again not a lot of people are doing. So I'm always good to test that. And then, uh, we don't have a huge event presence in terms of, like, conferences and booths and things like that. But we've, um, we. This year we started to test some, like, micro dinners, um, and just treating our customers like, to, like, events we would never have a booth at, but we're just there because we know they're there. They're the ones like, exhibiting. And then we are, like, treating them to like, a rest time or like a hangout time when they're like, not on the floor and they're not working. So that's something that we've tried twice and seen decent results from. And we'll probably continue to tweak it a little bit.

Host: That's smart. I like that. Especially when they're the ones that are on the floor and they're probably exhausted. As someone who's done plenty of trade shows as a marketer, I'm sure all marketers here have done that. Like, it sucks when you're on the third day and you're like, get me out of here. So I can relate to that. All right. Uh, I want to give you guys a chance to plug your companies. Sam, I know you have your own little venture also. I want to give you a chance to plug that also and what. And what you're doing with that before we, uh, before we break.

Sam Kuehnle: Cool. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, Locks is a company affect. A F, F, E, C T. That was a little tool I told you about. Fully built out of scratch, our own itch. Till mentor was like, you should productize this, make this something bigger. So it's a huge, huge product to paying customers right now. Just launched not long ago. So. But yeah, affect. So if anyone's interested, it helps to figure out where you're. Where you're constrained in your funnel and how to. How to go about breaking it.

Host: Awesome. I guess Sydney's one of the two paying customers.

Sam Kuehnle: I comped her.

Sydney Waterfall: I know where this guy. I know where this guy lives.

Host: I got it.

Sydney Waterfall: I got a Coupon. Uh, yeah, openbrand.com. uh, I think the best way to find me is LinkedIn. Or, uh, randomly I post on substack and it's like all over the place. So sometimes I don't post for a month and then sometimes I post a lot. So those are the two. Two places to find me.

Host: Cool. Well, look, I just, on behalf of Refined labs, just want to say how proud we all are of both of you. And just seeing you guys kill it out there uh, in the, you know in the, in the SaaS and then Jason SaaS face. We uh, were super happy. We're not surprised at all either by it. So just keep doing what you guys are doing. Keep killing it. Uh, appreciate everyone dropping by talking ABM. We'll get the recording out and also go on YouTube. We'll have some reels and stuff and uh, we'll see you all next month man. I'm excited to bring another Refined Labs alum Ben Reed on who uh, was the VP Marketing at FieldPulse and he's going to talk about 3xing of really, really unsexy product. So that's going to be an awesome discussion. So hopefully you guys can make that. That'll be on like the third week of July or so. Thank you all so much man. Have a great rest of your week. Enjoy your weekend and enjoy summer. Man. I know we're just kicking off here.

Sam Kuehnle: Bye everyone.